


There's a hunger like a lion's and it's ripping right through my bones

by cartographies



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: F/M, First Time, Love Letters, Masturbation, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 18:18:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5215850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliza had been so nervous about Alexander’s first letter that she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She’d just stood there frozen in place after it was handed to her. Frozen, except for how she was trembling all over. When she’d finally been able to move she’d rushed to find Angelica, letter in hand, and made her sister be by her side while she read it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's a hunger like a lion's and it's ripping right through my bones

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's 'Crane Your Neck'

Eliza was so nervous about Alexander’s first letter that she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She just stood there frozen in place after it was handed to her. Frozen, except for how she was trembling all over. When she’d finally been able to move she’d rushed to find Angelica, letter in hand, and made her sister be by her side while she read it.

“Are you sure you want me here?” Angelica says, laughing, as Eliza drags her sister to her room and shuts them both inside. “It’s probably ...intimate.”

“Oh, hush.” Eliza responds, momentarily distracted from her churning nerves enough to blush. “It’s his first letter. I’m sure it’s perfectly proper.”

Angelica doesn't look convinced.

Still, she sits beside Eliza on her bed anyway, and insists on opening the letter herself after seeing how Eliza’s fingers shake.

“When he says he hopes your blood stirs to the thought of him, I’m sure he won't be referring to you removing a finger with a letter opener,” Angelica teases. When she has parted letter from envelope, she presses the still folded pages into Eliza’s hand. The crease in the parchment is one of military precision, but still, the collected pages in her hand have a rather daunting thickness.

“You seem to have proved an inspirational subject,” Angelica observes, not really teasing this time. She’s started to look genuinely interested in the proceedings, when before Eliza had sensed some wariness behind the humor.

_Dear Miss Schuyler,_

_You’ll notice I haven't yet taken the liberty of using your given name, because if I did, it would deprive me of the pleasure of the moment when you grant me that honor. I hope to use that anticipation well, to match my performance in winning you to the incomparable honor of winning you, although the latter would be a gift of such immense value that I know that I am destined to lose the attempt._

“Yes, you were right and I was wrong. This is a completely typical first letter from a suitor,” Angelica says in tones of high sarcasm, and Eliza doesn’t feel bad about smacking her.

It continues:

 _I have never understood the poets when they speak of being struck by love’s arrow at first sight, and if I were a different man I might follow up that statement with ‘until I met you.’ But I will not condescend, or speak in cliches. Far better than any instant fall to your charms is the premonition that I can look forward to being bewitched by you, not quickly, but_ thoroughly. _To that end, I have written this before calling. Letters give one the time to deliberate, and I want you to think, and to give a complete accounting of yourself to me before we go forward. What brings you joy? What are the dearest wishes of your heart? What disquiets you? I can imagine on your face a look of shock as you read this. It is not typical for people many years married to know such things of each other, much less those who have just met. But I am not patient by nature; I can not find it within me to delay knowing the promise of the soul I saw in your eyes two nights ago._

On, and on it goes, a work of alchemy where Eliza feels she is the thing that has been transformed from coarse metal to gold by its end. Her mind is already racing to her response. 

When Eliza finishes reading she stared blindly in front of her for a few moments, and then prepares to get up to secret it away somewhere out of sight for a while, to savor it before reading it over again - she can already predict she will probably read every one until they crumble away to nothingness. But Angelica puts her fingers to her wrist, gently, and it is enough to stop Eliza from standing up like she was about to.

“This one,” she says with a nod of her head to the letter Eliza still holds, “is hungry. The kind of hunger that’s dangerous. Be careful, love.”

“What do you mean?” Eliza asks, more sharply than intended. She thinks she guesses what Angelica is getting at. “I’m not stupid. I know Daddy’s wealth has something to do with his interest. Why shouldn’t it? It’s no bad thing, for someone not born to comfort to want a little, as long as he is willing to work for it, too. But I don’t think - I don’t think I’m vain to believe that I have enough attractions in myself to not make that the only reason.” 

She’s being honest, despite the defensiveness in her tone. She hasn’t ever once doubted that the admiration in Alexander’s eyes that night was nothing less than she deserved. She has never sought the spotlight, but eyes have always gravitated towards her anyway. That they gravitated towards Angelica first has never diminished that for her, or made her doubt the attention once it was hers.

“Oh, Eliza, he’s lucky you deigned to speak to him. You know I think there’s no man that could ever deserve you.” Angelica says this with a conciliatory squeeze, and Eliza knows that is true, too. Her annoyance melts away instantly.

She only feels uneasy once Angelica has risen from her bed, chatted for a few moments about silly things, and left the room. What did Angelica mean by dangerous hunger? Eliza would think that her passionate sister, of all people, would sympathise. Perhaps she was somehow implying that Eliza was not equal to that passion. She is suddenly consumed with the desire to call down the stairs after Angelica that she is hungry too. She is so hungry she sometimes feels ill with it.

*

For Alexander’s next letter, she does not need her sister’s support. By the third, she would not feel able to take advantage of it even if she did need it.

There is still nothing technically improper about its content, she supposes. When viewed in the most detached and objective light, it doesn’t contain anything that would make her hesitate to let her sister read it, or even her parents.

But the way it makes her feel - oh, she can’t even think of her parents in the same breath. Her first reading makes her useless for the rest of the day, starting like a felon when anyone speaks to her, feeling that surely her thoughts are obvious from her face, from the thunderous applause of her racing pulse.

She forces herself to wait long hours, until the rest of the house is long gone to bed, to extract the letter from where she placed it in the locked box where she stores his letters, and read it again.

_Dearest Eliza,_

_You asked me in your last letter to share my thoughts about this revolution of ours. Is it not obvious? Haven’t you been up to your eyeteeth in speeches about the justice of our cause, the nobility of our resistance, the glory in our sacrifices, the virtue in our separation from degenerate old England? What can I offer but a hearty avowal of these worthy principles?_

_But, ah, I see you’ve caught me out. I am of a cynical bent unsuited to these bunting and bandstand sentiments. My mind is often preoccupied with what will be the fruits of our justice and nobility and glory and justice and virtue. What is going to be the shape of the nation we are bringing into being?_

_I have always approached this mental exercise with passion, but without attachment. Surely to take up arms and fight is enough to create such a bond of devotion? Yes, but devotion without hope. When I looked to my place within this imagined society, I saw a void. You know enough of my origins to perhaps understand my feelings of strangerhood. But now, with your last letter granting me that dearly sought liberty, I begin to conjure fantasies of a place, unique, for me and me alone. Can you imagine what strange power you possess, to craft with a simple five letters, and the vision of your dear face and figure that accompanies it, an entire homeland for a man who has previously been stateless, rootless, family-less?_

_I welcome the knowledge, given in your last letter, that you also look forward to a life after this conflict, that you treasure freedom for the possibilities we can hope to enjoy by its entering a new stage. ‘A country where people can raise their children in the hope of more virtue and security than before’ - well said, but I must confess the feeling of pleasure and excitement this image stirred in me did not originate from any philosophical appreciation. You speak deprecatingly of what you could contribute, but I will tell you your modesty, though admirable, goes too far in this case. You have worked a piece of magic: your soul has called forth a new hope and a renewed effort in mine. I like to imagine mine could have a similar effect on yours. Darling Eliza, my America, my new-found land - I dream of the possibility of shaping the soul of this nation together._

It is very late, and utter quiet envelopes the house, and Eliza with it. Still, she gets up and shoves a chair under the doorknob just to be safe, and crawling under her thick coverlet when she returns to the bed for good measure. 

She has done this before, but always in a rather perfunctory way. Her fantasies had not been totally without form. Good looking boys of her acquaintance had taken their turns as the star, but with a lack of concreteness that meant her mind often wandered before the end, the act reduced to a merely physical one. More often than not she was thinking of mundanities when she finally found release, like whether the tear in her second-best gown had been mended yet.

The niceties exchanged at the gatherings that make up the social life of the respectable and unmarried provided no firm hold for her desire. Men paid compliments to her beauty, her sweetness. None had ever thought to inquire about the shape of her soul, and she couldn’t blame them. It was not knowledge she had ever particularly sought either.

Eliza does not just ruck up her gown, does not lie on her stomach and get on with it as she usually does. She pinches the material slightly above the hip and begins to slide it upward with agonizing slowness. She imagines that it is Alexander doing it, that he is revealing her piecemeal, his dark eyes cataloguing every inch. She has to stop and breathe when the hem has barely cleared her knees, because of a long shiver that is breaking in waves over her entire body, starting at the center of her and radiating outward. She bites her lip hard and feels the skin give under the pressure. 

Eliza knows, in a broad sense, what men and women do with each other. Because Angelica knows, and Angelica has never possessed the arrogance that is the birthright of older sisters, to know things before her younger counterparts and to then lord that knowledge over them, sharing it only at her whim. She has always been even-handed and generous with her knowledge, and it is just Eliza’s good luck to have the cleverest of sisters, with a knack for knowing things she probably ought not to know. 

She lays on her back plants her feet wide to assist her imagination, as she begins to touch herself, to better envision Alexander lowering himself on top of her, fitting himself between her legs. A place, for him and him alone. Kissing her, as he pushes his way inside her. It is frustratingly insubstantial. Even the best knowledge of what will happen then does not give understanding of how it will feel. But Eliza imagines, not just him bearing down on her but her working with him, opening herself for him, relaxing her muscles to make room for what previously her body could not have imagined having room for. She slips one finger inside herself. She’s so tight, and she wonders if it will hurt. She hopes so. She imagines getting up the morning after and going down to the wedding breakfast and everyone knowing, their sly innuendos - before it was mortifying to think about but now it makes her feel hot all over, the thought that the initiated will know she is his wife in every way, the twinge between her legs as she sits down in the chair that has been hers since she was old enough to join the family at mealtimes her secret proof, proof that no one but she will ever have access too. 

She comes almost before she knows it’s happening, a blissful expansion, where she blends into everything, Eliza into the bed, the room, the letter in her hand, no sign where she ends and anything else begins. Her throat struggles to draw breath; it takes a moment for her to recognize that she is the origin for the heaving gasps she is hearing, loud on the still night air. 

Alexander spoke of conjuring, but he was the one casting spells. 

Oh, out and about with her sisters in New York, she had felt it. It had been like an electric hum in the air, so potent it raised the hair on the back of her neck. A person would have to be a special kind of insensible not to feel it, not to react to it in some way. She had felt a profound gratitude just to be a witness to it. 

But Eliza does not have Angelica's gift for ideas. Angelica could make her own meaning from the frenzied spirit surrounding them, or find it in books. Eliza knows herself enough to understand that she is of a more practical bent. She needs to ground herself in people, in everyday existence.

While Angelica had been fascinated by the merits and demerits of the arguments made by the men who gathered in every square and at every tavern to talk and debate, Eliza was more interested in the men themselves. Not like _that_ , not like _this_. But by the energy that seemed to rise from their very skin, by their hunger, by the way whether young or old, rich or poor, each took it for granted that he had a unique right to participate in this moment. The casual arrogance in the belief that they had a role to play in the shaping of whatever world was going to follow this one. Their conviction that a new world could be made at all.

Then, Alexander. It wasn’t that he made those street-corner prophets that had so fascinated her seem inferior and ridiculous, although in comparison they somehow were. It was that if Eliza has created a unique place for him, he had opened a door for her, a way to be one small part of this huge machine, grinding its way towards some new creation. Before she had felt somehow aloof from the process, condemned to see but not truly know. 

She knows then what she is going to do. 

*

The army is quartered right outside of town, a sprawling mass of tents and hastily constructed wooden structures that appear even less capable than the tents of keeping the sharp winds of early spring out.

From a sentry, she finds out that one of those huts is the current residence of Alexander. She focuses on picking her way delicately across the frozen mud to where she has been directed, rather than the memory of the sentry’s leer and the way he’d elbowed his companion. They obviously had the wrong idea. Or the right idea. They’re only mistaken in certain particulars.

When she knocks on the wood frame of the dwelling, for there is no door but a scavenged sheet of canvas, a curt “yes” is the only response.

The comical double take Alexander does on seeing her is one she would like preserve in her memory forever, and she is aided in this desire by the fact that it lasts for several long moments. He is wearing spectacles. She hadn’t know he needed them, and the sight of him wearing them sends a ridiculous pang through her, and if she didn’t know by the very fact of her presence here that she was in trouble, that would do it.

He can’t seem to stop boggling at her filling his doorway. Eliza thinks another man would try to hide his surprise, adopt a voice of authority, quickly shift to disapproval or worry. She is suddenly overcome with absurd tenderness at how Alexander can’t seem to hide his emotions, and more, never seems to want to. She senses there are things he will not talk about: his childhood, his dead. She thinks he knows he would betray all of himself if he did.

He must be terrible at cards; Eliza herself is an excellent player.

“May I come in? It’s cold out here.” 

“Miss Schuyler,” he says. “Of course.” This is punctuated by him gesturing to the sole chair in the room, which he just has risen from. He was writing, she sees, on a lap desk. There is a small stove, which makes the structure bearable but far from cozy, and a cot. 

She does not want to sit. She moves towards the stove, lifting up her skirts to warm her icy toes. 

His rejected, rote bit of gallantry dispensed with, Alexander gives in to what was surely his first impulse and asks, “What on earth are you doing here?” 

“Visiting you,” Eliza says, as if it should be obvious. “Why did you call me Miss Schuyler? I gave you permission to use my given name.” It had taken it a moment to realize he had called her that. It had sounded natural, she realized, because despite the feeling the sight of the simple letters of her nickname had induced on paper, he has never had the chance to use it in person. She is glad he called her Miss Schuyler. She would not have wanted to miss the first time he calls her by her name. 

“Eliza,” he says, and she was right; it falls from his mouth like everything does, not like just the cold collection of sounds ordinary speech is made up of, but a living thing. “Why are you here? Did you walk?”

“It’s only a couple of miles.” Eliza shrugs. She is fond of walking, and the road was well known and the moon full. 

“I came to thank you for your letters. They have had...a very powerful effect on me.” She is floundering. It wouldn’t do to just throw herself at him, but she is also helpless, for the moment, to verbalize the real reason for her presence. She is hoping that statement, the idea that she would walk miles in the middle of the night to thank him for his letters, is so ridiculous that he will not dignify it with a direct response. 

She was right. Alexander looks dumbstruck for a moment, but then he obviously decides the immediate fact of her presence itself is more intriguing than the reason for it. He focuses on her with a sudden intensity that leaves her breathless. “My letters pleased you?” He sounds pleased himself at the thought.

“False modesty doesn’t suit you,” she replies, a bit of flirtatious bite behind it. “Do you believe I’ll just accept that you aren’t aware of your way with words?”

Alexander gives her a smile of that can only be described as sweetly smug, despite the contradiction in terms. She doesn’t think any other man alive could pull it off.

“I have reason to be confident in my skill in other areas. I have the evidence.” He gestures to the tiny space, and by extension to the camp, the army, the Revolution itself. “Only you can provide me evidence of its power in this area.”

Eliza feels strangely furious at this, at a sense of falseness in his speech. She thinks of the bold strokes of his pen and the dazzling phrases of mingled assurance and vulnerability they had formed. She thinks of the vulnerability they had laid open within herself, and feels such a frustration at this reversion to trite drawing-room flirtation that she has to look into the banked flame of the stove to hide the tears she feels gathering. Angelica said she found it endearing, how Eliza found herself in unwilling tears when annoyed or angry. _“But then, when you are_ truly _angry or upset - no tears to be found. You go steely and blank-faced. Even when we were very small. Daddy called you ‘the little judge’, taking everyone to task without saying a word.”_

She masters herself quickly. “Do you expect me to believe,” she says, looking back up into his liquid-dark, fever-bright eyes, “I am the first girl you’ve written love letters to?” 

She instantly wants to snatch back the word love from where she has thrown it down between them, but she thinks she ought not. If she felt he was being less than earnest here, it wouldn’t become her to be less than honest herself. Whatever designation the writer himself would give those letters, love had been the result for her. 

“Ah, well. Yes. In a way.” Alexander isn’t blushing or giving into anything so silly as embarrassment, but a look of consternation has wrinkled his features. It is rather - although she will not say it, because it might mean him ceasing to make it - adorable. 

“In a way? I wouldn’t think it something you could do by half-measures.”

Alexander meets her eyes. “I don’t do anything by half-measures. But the goal of a love letter can vary widely.”

Eliza blinks, baffled.

“Before I was writing to girls to get them into bed, not to get them to marry me.” 

She marvels at the fact that with this pronouncement, more daring than anything before, all traces of uncertainty are gone from Alexander’s face. She feels a thrill at how little it took for him to cast off all pretensions, to take the conversation far from any possible script. He looks at her with an odd sort of challenge in his eyes. Does he imagine she will take offense, gasp in shock, swoon? Is that what he wants? Does he have an idea of a gently-bred, sheltered girl that he wants her to match?

To hide how unbalanced she feels, she says, “I suppose you have a half-measure of evidence, then. Unless you’re saying you’ve never succeeded in getting a girl into bed before.” 

“That’s what you’re responding to? Not the, “I want the marry you,” part of it?” 

“Of course that’s the part I’m responding to!” Then she splutters for a moment, speech snagged on the idea that it isn’t the done thing to respond that it was obvious that that was exactly what he desired, but then it isn’t the done thing for him to be talking about sleeping with girls. All the women she knows are fully aware that their husbands romantic histories prior to marriage are very different than their own, but allow said husbands to believe in the foolishness that they are ignorant of the fact. But then she thinks, to hell with it. “The other part was obvious.”

He grins at her, boyish and unashamed. “Good. It was supposed to be.” 

She wants to respond that this is good, she wants to marry him too, she’s glad they’re agreed - but she doesn’t. She has come too far to lose sight of her goal. 

She takes a step forward, and then another so she is close enough to him that she could touch his chest without fully extending her arm. She stays far enough away so she can meet his eyes without craning her neck backwards, or simpering under her lashes. “Go ahead. If I am to be the final judge of your power as a lover, I need all the evidence. Present your case.”

“My case.”

“Yes. If you’ll agree with the statement that marriage is the highest goal love letters can be put to accomplishing, before I can take the responsibility of ruling in your favor, I want an accounting of all the lesser triumphs your pen has achieved in this area.” Flirting and word play does not come naturally to Eliza. For her sister this would be easy, and she has the absurd wish that she had known to ask beforehand - _“Angelica, how can I say ‘tell me about all the sex you’ve had, in detail’ but not in so many words?”_

“Generally speaking, it isn’t considered politic to kiss and tell.” His body language belies his speech. A look of hunger has entered his eyes, and he is focusing on her so intensely that it seems as if his body is straining towards hers, although he hasn’t moved a muscle.

“ _Generally speaking_ , I don’t think you care much about politic.” 

“No, not usually. But I am very occasionally willing to try my best. For things I truly want. Of course,” and as he goes on, a previously suppressed delight takes over his features. “The best things in my life have never come from being politic. Quite the opposite. I shouldn’t be surprised that you are no exception.”

His delight makes her feel giddy. She has surprised him, and she does not think that happens often. Eliza is glad to give him a taste of the feeling that has consumed her, although she could not rightly call it surprise. For that, you have to expect something, and she could never in a million years have anticipated him. 

“So,” Alexander says, and he rocks back and forth on his heels, a gesture that could most honestly be described as ‘bouncing’. He steps forward and touches her for the first time all evening, just the tips of his fingers brushing her hair where it falls against her shoulders. “Where should I begin?”

“The beginning never goes amiss. Who was the first lucky girl?”

Alexander gives an exaggerated grimace. “You’re wrong there. Beginnings are often best ignored. It was a shopgirl. I was fifteen, she was eighteen, I wrote her a poem.”

“A poem! You’ve not gifted me with any poetry. I’m tempted to take offense.”

“You should take it as a mark of my esteem. I am a poor poet. My efforts did not meet with success.” 

Eliza _tsks_ at him. “No, I won’t accept such excuses. I want poetry from you.”

“Who am I to refuse such a command? I already feel more optimism about my skill this time around. I think you inspire me to my best.”

“None of that, now,” she says, and her voice remains admirably steady as his hands touch her throat, her collarbone, as he unclasps her heavy winter cloak and deposits it on his chair. “No more delaying. When did you have success?”

“The next year. She was a laundress. My flirting at the water pump proved unfruitful, so I started leaving her notes instead. It had the desired effect. She cornered me in the stairwell of my boarding-house and up to my room we went.” 

“What,” she licks her lips, and she feels Alexander’s hands squeeze around her upper arms where he has placed them, almost hard enough to bruise. “What did you do there?” 

“Can’t you imagine?” He’s teasing, drawing it out. He thinks that she can’t imagine, that he will need to tell her.

“Yes,” she said, and she’s beyond flirting, beyond trying to match wits with him. She is swept up on the emotion that has been building since that moment in the front hall, his letter in her hand. “Do you know what effect your letters had on me? Can you imagine?” 

“Maybe. But I think I’ll enjoy hearing you tell it far more.”

“I took out your last letter late at night. I locked my door and I lay in my bed and I...touched myself, thinking of it, of you, of being your wife.”

His breathing has gone ragged. “That was not quite the intended effect.”

“You should be careful,” she says, and she does not mean it, she would hate if he was ever careful because it would mean he was anything other than himself. “You should better judge all possible effects of your pen.”

“This is a poor strategy, if that is your desire, because -” 

Eliza does not let him go on. She kisses him. His glasses grind against her nose painfully, but she’s strangely hesitant to take them off. She likes that they make him a little less handsome. She likes that he wears them anyway, that his vanity loses out against his need to write true. 

But he takes them off first, casts them aside with a careless gesture she hopes he won’t regret. He does not waste time on the chaste presses of lips that have been her experience of kissing thus far. He buries his fingers in her hair, his tongue in her mouth. 

Then she is the one not wasting time. She drags him back towards the cot, drags him over her, so his hips are cradled within her own. 

He rucks up her many inconvient layers of clothing with a smooth, practiced effort that makes her feel a pang of disquiet. It is a simple fact that he will never be as overwhelmed by her as she is by him. But the look of awe on his face , as he slides down the mattress and presses a kiss to her knee, and then another, higher, and higher until his face is right between her legs - that is something. Alexander hesitates for a moment, and the fact that he stops, for her, for just the barest moment - that is something more. 

Eliza imagines she can feel the wet heat coming from center of her, wonders if he can feel it too, a caress against his lips where they are so close to her but still not quite touching. He looks at her in question, but the look on her face, the involuntary motion her hand makes to clutch his hair as those eyes of his meet hers is answer enough, and his mouth is on her before she can gather the presence of mind to choke out permission, or maybe a plea. 

He does not hesitate, now. He arranges how her he wants, knees spread wide so she is exposed completely, feeling her things tingling just a bit in protest and inner folds parting for the flat of his tongue, even before he decides this simply isn’t enough and spreads her fully with his fingers. He does not hesitate but he does not rush forward, either. She thinks about his writing, both precise and exhausting, and that is just how his attentions now could be described. He dismantles her efficiently, but not straightforwardly. She feels as if she is on the edge of release forever. He opens the way with his tongue for one finger to push inside her, and oh, his fingers are slender and graceful but still so much larger than her own. She feels that it is a stretch and so does he, his groan from the feeling of her flesh tightening around him, welcoming the intrusion, causing vibrations that crawl over every inch of her skin, and she comes with what would be a scream if there was enough breath left in her to produce sound. 

When she can think again, Eliza says, “I want to see you.” She gets ready to elaborate, because after what they’ve just done surely she cannot possibly be embarrassed by articulating anything she wants? But Alexander doesn’t give her chance. He disentangles himself from her skirts and sits back on his haunches with a noise halfway between a laugh and a groan, and with no little amount of undignified fumbling, manages to undo his trousers and pull out his cock. 

Eliza looks. She wants to laugh at first because truly the things are absurd, and then she is angry at how little she wants to laugh, at how the yawning pit of hunger in her stomach seems to never stop expanding. She wants to give him the pleasure he has just given her, but she can’t help herself. Her whole body is still shaking from before, but she fists her skirts in one hand and with grips his shoulder with the other for balance and crawls right into his lap, and rubs her sex against the head of his erection in a frictionless slide that makes her mouth fall open dumbly anyway, that has Alexander saying, “oh God, oh fuck,” and with one hand tugging down the neck of her dress so he can get his mouth on her breasts. With the other he steadies himself for her, and she gets off again just like that, grinding her clit against him, Alexander desperately trying to hold still for her. But it’s a frenzied, graceless thing, and his hips move in small spasms, so the tip of him sometimes just catches against her entrance, and she thinks she would just push down, take him inside her, if she wasn’t lost to absolutely everything but chasing the feeling that is lighting its way up her spine. She’s so wet that she it coats her thighs, her dress, the pants he is still wearing. 

After she comes, Alexander reverses their positions, so she lies beneath him. Her ears are ringing strangely and she wonders if he go going to fuck her right then, but instead he just slides his cock against the slick junction of her thigh and belly, and she says “Here, let me -” and it takes only a few strokes of her hand over his length for him to come. Most of his release catches in her petticoats. She’ll have to figure out a way to burn them, and the dress, because there is no way in heaven or hell she can ever attempt to get them washed. 

The cot is much tinier than it felt just moments before, they are disgusting, she must be going soon, and she is happy.

*

“Well,” Eliza says a bit later. “I guess that takes care of one worry.”

Alexander makes a hum of question.

“I wondered for a moment, if wishing to get a girl into bed and wanting her to be your wife were mutually exclusive. A misunderstanding of your syntax. Obviously that isn’t the case.”

He gives a laugh, soft and not for Eliza’s benefit. She only knows it happened by the vibrations beneath her ear where it rests on his chest. It makes something twinge beneath her breastbone, the private sound of his joy like a finger that has reached out and plucked some chord within her. 

“My America, my new-found land,” and it is endearment rather than quotation. “You aren’t familiar with ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’? Good thing you didn’t ask someone else to enlighten you. That could have been embarrassing,” Alexander turns, dislodging Eliza from the chest so he can look her in the eye, his voice going low and sweet. “Licence my roving hands,” his hand runs up from her ankle bone to knee, “and let them go, before,” -hip, “behind” - ass, a wit, her Alexander, “between” - just the slightest touch between her legs, “above” - navel, “below,” tracing the skin just below her breast. “Donne isn’t talking about geography.”

Eliza meets his laughing eyes and they both look down to where Alexander’s hand has come to rest in the space between her breasts. “Not the earthly sort, at least,” she says tartly.

Will his every smile ever cease to be a revelation? “Eliza,” Alexander says, “I want to be taking you to bed for the rest of my _life._ ”


End file.
